Month: September 2026

Categories
Awareness and insight Inner vision Integral Awareness Life-fullness Meditation and Psychology Mindful Confidence Mindful Resilience Mindful Self-Leadership Mindfulness

Accelerating your process of mastery (& special offer on Life-fullness Life coaching)

“Sentence-completion practice is a bit like the anti-AI, in that it is designed to stimulate & enhance your active intelligence & capability, rather than reduce it by handing it over to an LLM”

Dear Integral Meditators, 

In this week’s article I describe a way of working that I have been using for many years that is extremely time-effective and accelerates any area that you are trying to achieve mastery in.
It is also a bit like the anti-AI, in that it is designed to stimulate and enhance your active intelligence and capability, rather than reduce it by handing it over to an LLM.
 
Next couple of week’s there is a special offer of 15% off my Life-fullness life coaching and Mindful Self-Knowledge Programs.
 
This week’s Wednesday & Saturday meditation classes are the  Autumn equinox balancing & renewing meditation. It’s an opportunity to digest & recalibrate as we move into the final quarter of 2026!
 
In the spirit of mastery,

Toby
 


Up until September 9th – Special offer on Toby’s Life-fullness life coaching and Mindful Self-Knowledge Programs
 
Life-Fullness Integral Coaching Program (LICP) is an integral form of 1:1 coaching with Toby that you can sign up for periods of six-months or three-months at a time. It is mindfulness oriented personal coaching that focuses upon the development of three R’s:

  • Re-generate your creative self and curiosity in life
  • Re-connect to deeper levels of motivation and meaning within yourself, your relationships and your career
  • Re-awakening to a sense of your own inner confidence, energy and personal power


Article: Sentence completion – accelerating your process of mastery
 
The process of mastery
 
In his book ‘Mastery’ George Leonard describes the process of becoming a master at anything a journey of peaks and plateaus.

  • The peaks are periods where we make rapid progress, like climbing up the steep part of a mountain ascent, we rise fast, and the feeling is exhilarating. These ‘peaks’ are then usually followed by regressions or descents, where we go back to near the level we were at before we ‘peaked’
  • The plateaus are the longer, ‘flatter’ extended periods after a peak/regression where we practise repeatedly, often with little visible progress, in order to gradually stabilize the previous ‘peak learnings’

In this process, most of the time is spent on the plateau, which involves steady, patient persistence, and the ability to not feel discouraged by the seeming lack of progress. Life on the plateau is very ‘process oriented’, getting gradually, incrementally better. It’s kind of the opposite of a ‘quick fix-immediate result’ mentality, which is why mastering anything is difficult, and most people give up, even though they are capable of it, if they had the persistence.
 
Sentence completion – Helping your mind self-organize
 
One of the things I have found to help my process of mastery is sentence completion. It is a technique I came across in around 2012 in Nathaniel Branden’s work on self-esteem. I order to work on and ‘master’ the creation of self-esteem, he created exercises where you create a sentence stem, and then complete it in 8-10 different ways, as quickly as possible. The effect of this is to invite our conscious and unconscious minds to combine together to develop awareness, insight and integrations around the subject of investigation. In other words, it helps your mind to self-organize, and integrate around the topic, which then increases the overall rate of your subject mastery.
Sentence-completion is an activity that I encourage clients to do quite often in my Life-fullness life coaching, as well as on my Mindful Self-Knowledge Program, as a way of integrating the learning from the sessions.
It is also something that I do for myself. I spent a long-time doing sentence completion around self-esteem mastery, which was Nathaniel Branden main focus, which I thoroughly recommend. Now I do it in any area of my own life where I am trying to master an activity or subject.
For example, I currently have sentence completion processes set up around:

  • My effectiveness in daily-living
  • My business activities
  • My squash game

By doing active sentence completion around these activities, I find that my progress accelerates, and I grow faster. Here are two examples of the first domain, effectiveness in daily living:
 
Example 1:
 
Sentence stem: If I want to stay focused & not procrastinate –
 
Completions:

  1. I can build capacity for humour
  2. I can keep smiling at the stress
  3. I can persist at the list within the list
  4. I can stand & stretch between work stints
  5. I can Relax into the stress & direct it
  6. I can practice witnessing around ‘the drama’
  7. I can stay motivated by my daughters
  8. I can combine the how with the why as motivation
  9. When things get crazy it can all be myself, being the world, doing itself
  10. I can get my inner family to support each other and marshal their resources

 
Example 2:
 
Sentence stem: If I choose the path of skillful acceptance today –
 

  1. I will enhance my effortless-effort
  2. I won’t pretend that I am somewhere that I am not
  3. I will not be overwhelmed by being overwhelmed
  4. I will take the time to be present & aware
  5. I may be more patient
  6. If I am I need of support, I will be better able to extend it to myself
  7. I will be more inwardly coherent
  8. My creative spirit will be in good hands
  9. I won’t feel alone
  10. My ego will be quieter & more singular

 
So, you can see it is quite a simple, time effective way of stimulating insights and helping your mind to self-organize around an activity. The beauty is that once you have done the daily sentence completion, the integration kind of happens ‘by itself’ as a result of the completions.
 
What areas of your life could you accelerate your process of mastery around with sentence completion today?
 
Related reading: Re-discovering joy in your thinking – Five aspects of mindful mental mastery

© Toby Ouvry 2026, you are welcome to use or share this article, but please cite Toby as the source and include reference to his website www.tobyouvry.com 
 

Follow Toby on: LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram

Integral Meditation Asia

Live workshops & online Courses * 1:1 Coaching * Books * Corporate Mindfulness Training *Life-Coaching *  Meditation Technology

Categories
A Mind of Ease Concentration Integral Awareness Integral Meditation Life-fullness Meditation and Psychology mind body connection Mindful Resilience Mindfulness Stress Transformation

Does meditation always make things better?

“Meditative presence & mindful-flow are what you might call perineal life pre-skills. The better you are at them the more ways you find to be effective & content amidst a wide range of circumstances”

Dear Integral Meditators, 

This week’s article explores meditation as a life-skill, as opposed to a formal practice. It articulates why, if you understand this, the danger of your meditation becoming imbalanced in any way reduces substantially.

This week sees the start on Saturday of the  Meditations for transforming negativity and stress into energy, positivity & empowerment deep-dive sessions. All welcome, particpation can be doen in person, on line or via recording.

In the spirit of flowing presence,

Toby


Article: Does meditation always make things better?
 
I recently received an article from a college entitled Meditation can help and it can harm. This is what happens when it goes wrong. It legitimately points out that not everyone who tries meditation benefits from it, and that sometimes meditation can ‘make things worse’ in the sense of creating imbalances, or increasing things like anxiety. What I want to do in this article is:

  • Offer some pointers around what meditation and mindfulness are in the broadest sense
  • Propose that, done in balance, these three fundamental aspects of meditation will be helpful to anyone
  • And give an example from my own experience 

Meditation is:
 
So then, speaking in broad, overarching definitions, the basic meditation state is:
 
“Not being lost in thought, not falling asleep, present to an object of awareness in the moment, and aware that you are aware of it”
 
This definition is basically a fancy way of saying that meditation is practising being present! When you are meditating you grow capacity high quality presence. Broadly speaking, the greater your capacity for presence and being present is, the more effective you will be in life. The reason for this is that good quality presence releases what I would call your natural intelligence in that moment. This facilitates better self-regulation, awareness, decision-making and so forth.
 
Mindfulness is:
 
Broadly speaking (again) mindfulness is attention training. In order to be present, you need to be able to pay attention well. Good quality mindful attention has two aspects, focus and flow.
 
There are essentially two extremes that you can go to with mindful attention:

  • You can try and focus too hard which means the mind can’t settle
  • You can relax too much, and forget what you are trying to pay attention to

Like meditation presence, building mindful flow, i.e. balanced, good quality, sustainable attention will generally only help you in your life. It will help you with being present, with basic reality orientation, with sustainable effort and so on…the better you are at it, the more capable and resilient you will be in the face of life challenges.
 
Another definition of meditation:
 
“Meditation means to focus our attention on an object that, when we contemplate it, causes our mind to become positive, calm and/or happy, in a balanced way”
 
This is a definition that I was taught in my Tibetan Buddhist days, back in the 90’s. In this sense, meditation is simply the art of remaining oriented in a positive manner as life happens to you. Like the first two definitions, the better you are at the ‘positive mindfulness game’ of meditation, the better things will get.
 
A personal reflection:
 
When I left my life as a monk in 2001, I was in many ways under a lot of stress:

  • I had left an old familiar life
  • I was in a foreign country with no job, so a lot of uncertainty
  • I was quite isolated
  • There was a lot of emotional trauma I was working thru
  • I had a high learning curve from starting my own business

 
I was also quite burned out from having overtrained in formal meditation (over quite a long period of time), so doing a lot of formal, sitting meditation was not that helpful for me. However, the fundamental meditation/mindfulness skills of:

  • Being present in a relaxed, focused manner
  • Orienting and centering around positive objects of awareness

 
Was always fundamentally helpful to me during that time. The fundamentals of meditation and mindfulness are what you might call perineal life pre-skills. The better you are at them the more effective you are, and the more ways you find to be content amidst a wide range of circumstances.
 
One final point, understood in the above manner, we can start to understand that meditation is a creative activity, not a narrow, rigid set of parameters. Without wanting to fall into a cliché, it’s a way of life!
 
Listen to Toby’s meditations on Presence & flow, as well as mindful positivity.
 
Related reading: The foundational pillars or goal-poste of meditative presence
Your basic mindful flow state
Meditation – Life as a positive mindfulness game

© Toby Ouvry 2026, you are welcome to use or share this article, but please cite Toby as the source and include reference to his website www.tobyouvry.com 

Follow Toby on: LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram

Integral Meditation Asia

Live workshops & online Courses * 1:1 Coaching * Books * Corporate Mindfulness Training *Life-Coaching *  Meditation Technology

Categories
creative imagery Inner vision Integral Meditation Life-fullness meditation and creativity Meditation and Psychology Presence and being present Stress Transformation

Never the same meditation twice

“Being consciously, creatively responsive to the present moment is a powerful tool (maybe the most powerful) that we have for making the world a better place, & we all have it within us”

Dear Integral Meditators, 

This week’s article explores one of the main driving practices in my meditation practice; creativity. 

This week also sees the start of three stress-transformation programs: 

The theme for this weeks stress-transfromation sessions is ‘Karuna: Using compassion & wisdom to transform your pain & create connection’. 

In the spirit of creative transformation,

Toby
 


Article: Never the same meditation twice
 
I was in a weekly class at a Business school last recently that I have been running for the last decade. A guy came to the session who has been coming since around 2018. At the end of the experience he said “Toby, I have never been in a session of yours that was the same, I always hear and experience something new!”. This is actually true, as whilst there are always themes and principles that are consistent in my guided meditations, I am always responding to the moment, and trying new ways of expressing and practising meditation.
 
The beginners mind
 
One of the reasons for the variation and novelty in my sessions is that part of being a meditator is having a beginner’s mind, a sense of each moment being a new moment, different from the moment before. Every time I come back to a familiar practice or theme, I notice there is something new about it, because in this moment, the experience is different from all the other times I have done the practice.
 
The artist and creative evolutionary in you
 
Another reason for the creativity in my sessions is that I am originally an artist by training, and so the idea of creating in the moment, and of life being like a work of art is very strong in me. Not just that, one of the things I am trying to communicate in my work is that you also are creative. Being consciously, creatively responsive to the present moment is a powerful tool (maybe the most powerful tool) that we have for making the world a better place, and we all have it within us.
Alfred North Whitehead, the philosopher also described the process of evolution as the ‘creative advance into novelty’. When we align with the evolutionary impulse of the universe, we become much more spontaneous and creative, naturally. You might say we express the spirit of evolution when we get in touch with our creative nature and express it skillfully.
 
To create, you need a framework
 
So, in order to create in meditation, as in other areas of life, you need to have framework, or a set of principles that give you the basis. For example, in my stress-transformation meditations, I tend to work off four main principles:
 

  1. Witnessing – from fighting stress to being curious about it 
  2. Flowing – from resisting emotions to feeling and releasing them
  3. Framing – from being lost in the inner conversation to creating it
  4. Appreciating – from feeling unlucky and hard done-by to appreciating the opportunity

From these four principles there are a huge variety of types of stress transformation that I have come up with and teach. Also, in my daily life I use these principles to improvise meditations that help me with a presenting challenge. For example, last night I had jet-lag from a recent trip to the UK. Not being able to sleep, and feeling the presence of a variety of challenging emotions and thoughts about my life, I set up a three-stage pattern of meditation:

  1. Head – nine breaths of brain relaxation meditation to move into non-conceptual presence
  2. Heart – nine breaths of letting emotions come and go, acknowledging them and letting them flow
  3. Belly – nine breaths of reverse abdominal breathing to build energetic strength and balance

 
Practising this as I lay down in bed, after five minutes or so I was feeling really quite good already, a state almost as good as being asleep. After half an hour or so I drifted off into a restful sleep. Waking up the next morning I felt good despite being tired.
I’ve never done a meditation in exactly that manner before, it was new, I created it! But it was based upon the four principles of stress-transformation, which were the basis from which I improvised from.
 
Wishing you creativity in your own life and meditation practice!
 
Related article: Four stress-transformation ‘flips’


© Toby Ouvry 2026, you are welcome to use or share this article, but please cite Toby as the source and include reference to his website www.tobyouvry.com 

Follow Toby on: LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram

Integral Meditation Asia

Live workshops & online Courses * 1:1 Coaching * Books * Corporate Mindfulness Training *Life-Coaching *  Meditation Technology